I've used perl extensively - and other scripting languages from time to time - to write little unitities or simulations for Oracle. Perl is available on windows, but it doesn't provide easy access to all the Windows API and .NET utilities (such as accessing WMI counters). For that PowerShell would be the best choice.

It's not entirely obvious how to connect to oracle from Powershell. Here's how I did it.

You need to install the Oracle Data Provider for .NET. Once that is done, you load it in powershell using this command:

The ADO.NET constructs are fairly clumsy compared to perl DBI, but they get the job done. And if you want to write some code that integrates Windows APIs with Oracle database access, Powershell is probably a good choice (A C# console application would be the alternative I suppose). I have to perform some experiments shortly on latch contention in which I'll be tracking WMI counters and v$latch statistics concurrently and PowerShell should provide a useful means of doing that.

Quest sponsors one of the powershell GUIs out there. If you need a GUI to dabble in powershell, check out www.powergui.org.